Non-paywall link to NYT story:
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/technology/duckduckgo-conspiracy-theories.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DPDmwZiPgYCIiG_EPKarska8Y43DiGT9xON_okQ_pp1u5FNkd8DhWor5yemZkeZSUprIb5FkUH46XwZ5Fquzn7cjv-b-5l2Ly0ux_BYDK8DPTagXA-Jw9h8o9icw2hxSdZwK3aQed13tB03vchU58sVi5AMHfRx4TgCBp0MdqCZgiNqVVlHrEEBkyA2IKU-LkCcw5NCFnZT3kZ4Ww06NlUOth_L7-oZld7O5K42eNNfzQueIS5BJQxRJzWlaFqtdPOqx-Pysm3xJYmBXKtpZG-eIsmvyZ5t6yTLwk&smid=url-share" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/technology/duckduckgo-con...</a><p>5+ years ago, back when [0] people noticed that Nazi sites were the top Google results for "did the holocaust happen" — presumably because of the way Google prioritized literal text match in titles/headlines for esoteric queries — DDG had been providing bespoke responses via DuckDuckHack, its crowdsourced instant answer program [1]. Back then, and today, if you query a variation of "did the holocaust happen", the top result, in big large text, is "Yes"<p>DuckDuckHack was discontinued in 2017 because it didn't scale. The associated code repos are still available; for example, you can see how DDG's Instant Answer test suite specifically validated answers to questions about the Holocaust and the moon landing. [2]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/11/google-frames-shapes-and-distorts-how-we-see-world" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/11/google...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://duckduckhack.com/" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckhack.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/blob/master/t/HistoricalEvents.t" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/blob/mas...</a>